‘The Cook’ at Berkeley Rep Tells a History of Cuba Through One Kitchen

“I’m so angry and I don’t know why,” says one Cuban American character visiting Havana for the first time in Eduardo Machado’s play The Cook. “This country is so confusing.”

The statement is a succinct summary of many people’s feelings about Cuba, both on the inside and the outside of its contemporary history, and the frustratingly complex dynamics at work there that resist succinct explanation at every turn.

Nevertheless, Cuban American playwright Eduardo Machado set about giving his own condensed take on his home country in The Cook, which had its premiere 23 years ago in New York, but remains a salient look at the country’s experience, pre- and post-revolution, in a new production at Berkeley Rep that opened Wednesday.

The play, which takes place entirely in the kitchen of one home in Havana, centers on Gladys (Yesenia Iglesias), the skilled and loyal cook to a household led by a loyalist of military dictator Fulgencio Batista and his wife, Adria (Gisela Chipe).

The action begins on December 31, 1958, New Year’s Eve, and the night before Batista would end up resigning as revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro took over the country. At first we see Adria annoyed that her husband hasn’t returned home from seeing his mistress, and she instructs the staff to turn all the clocks back an hour to pretend that midnight hasn’t happened, so that he’ll be “on time” for the toast.

Gladys busily prepares hors d’œuvres and Baked Alaska, as Adria had requested, and her cousin Julio (Ashton Muñiz) and servant Elena (Georgina Morillo) run in and out serving the invisible guests. But soon, Adria is running out the back door, a small suitcase in hand, and telling Gladys to keep the house safe for her eventual return. Suffice it to say, she will never return.

Gladys’s chauffeur husband Carlos (Daniel Duque-Estrada), meanwhile, is all in with the revolution, and excited to see Batista fall, but fails in convincing Gladys that their lives will soon get better.

The play then takes us through a second act set over a decade later, as Gladys continues keeping house and cooking for Carlos — who now has a functionary job in Castro’s government and a mistress of his own. Her cousin Julio, who is gay, has now become a target of Castro’s goons, and Carlos ends up giving her an impossible choice about saving him from a terrible fate.

And by the third act, we have come up to the 1990s, and we see Gladys running a paladar, a legalized form of home-cooking restaurant, out of the main dining room of the house — and it was a woman just like Gladys running a paladar, who Machado met on a visit to Cuba in 2001, who kept a photo on the wall of the original mistress of the house, who inspired the writing of the play.

Her life is not necessarily better or worse than it had been before Castro took over, but by the end of the show, with the fraught return of Adria’s daughter Lourdes (also played by Chipe) to check out her mother’s house and inform Gladys that Adria actually despised her in the end and never referred to her by name — only as “the cook” — that Gladys decides to claim ownership of the place at last.

It’s Lourdes who speaks the line about the country being so confusing, and she leaves no less confused.

Machado, who has written dozens of plays about Cubans and the Cuban-American experience, found a particular microcosm to explore about Castro’s Cuba here that centers on an accidental revolutionary, a woman who never had any intention of stealing property from her wealthy, Batista-affiliated employer, but who ended up functionally squatting there anyway for decades. And her reward for her loyalty is to find out that a woman she considered a friend did nothing but resent and distrust her, lumping her in with every other revolutionary who destroyed the Cuba that they knew — and which, for a time, was a glamorous and prosperous place for a wealthy few.

Economic rewards are meager too, because the promise of the Communist revolution never really came through either. And Machado leaves in an unsettled place, understanding only that, for someone like Gladys, the revolution at least gave her some agency and a modicum of dignity in the end.

Iglesias is a forceful and stoic presence on stage in the lead role, but she and Chipe fail to find the rhythm in the first act’s dialogue to give any sense of their genuine connection. Whether or not this was the intention of director David Mendizábal, it leaves us fairly incredulous as to why Gladys could remain so fond of and so loyal to this woman for thirty plus years after she was gone.

The exchanges between Iglesias and Duque-Estrada feel more natural, particularly as they become dependent on one another in the ensuing years, and in some regard closer. And their duality ends up effectively epitomizing two kinds of love of country — one that is unwavering and impassioned, and another that is skeptical, at arm’s length, if no less heart-felt.

Scenic designer Tanya Orellana took great pains to convey the feeling of a home kitchen in Havana, down to the real encaustic tile that covers nearly every surface. And the food of Havana is woven in and out of the story, with Gladys — like the real-life Gladys Machado encountered — best known for her mojo-style garlic chicken, but who also makes tamales in the style of Cubans’ indigenous ancestors.

As the real-life model for Gladys told Machado, “You know tamales are the only food we have left from the indigenous people that once lived here. Their souls comfort us when we eat tamales. I made you the tamales because I know you love this country.”

‘The Cook’ plays through October 11 at Berkeley Rep. Find tickets here.